An update after reading in the Guardian (11.08.15) that 'Cannabis residue has been discovered in pipes buried in William Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon garden' - it seems quite possible that the tobacco grown in the Cotswolds would have made its way to the Midlands - and there are suggestions that our locally grown tobacco had mildly hallucinogenic properties:
"O thou weed, who art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet that the sense aches at thee, Would thou hadst ne'er been born. (Othello)
When you think of
rolling a fag,
You might well think
of Golden Virginia or dear Old Holborn,
Rather than Old
Cotswold or Golden Winchcombe,
But it could have
been so much different…
Four centuries ago,
tobacco thrived
Around Winchcombe and
the Cotswold hills,
Smallholders grew
illegal cash crops;
Stuarts and Cromwell
alike tried to ban
This illicit but
hardly secret cultivation,
In their support for
the American colonists.
The leaves were dried
in Cotswold gardens,
Then short-stored in
Cotswold cottages,
Before making their
smuggled secret way
Along holloways and
old pack horse tracks,
Contraband Nicotiana
Rustica,
Edging its way
towards the Smoke,
Disorienting,
hallucinogenic,
But labelled as Best
Virginia ‘bacco;
Charles Stuart’s law
demanded arrests:
Arrests demanded
Cotswold resistance.
This pattern was
repeated under Cromwell,
But bumper
Commonwealth harvests knew no laws,
And so, once more, in
1658:
‘I got together 36
horse… found an armed multitude guarding the tobacco field.
We broke through
them… The soldiers stood firm and with cocked pistols bade
the multitude
disperse but they would not and 200 more came from Winchcombe.’
And so, later in that
same year:
Colonel Wakefield,
Governor of Gloucester, tried again…
‘But the country did
rise… in a great body, to the number of 500 or 600…
the tumult being so
great he was constrained to draw off and nothing more done.’
And so, once more,
the courts were tried again:
The accession of
Charles the Second saw huge fines,
Followed by further
Restoration threats in 1662,
Which were ignored as
usual,
Despite some
‘spoiling’ of crops and harvests by the authorities,
In this Robin Hood
outlaw tobacco land,
That constituted the
late 17th century Cotswolds;
No wonder Samuel
Pepys commented in 1677:
‘It seems the people
there do plant contrary to law, and have always done,
and still been under
force and danger of having it spoiled, as it hath been
oftentimes, and yet
they will continue to plant.’
But as so often, the
market spoiled what the law could not,
Market forces and
‘modernity’ destroyed a whole way of life
(‘To Progress we must
all submit, A sorry plight I do admit’);
As colonial
production increased, so prices went down,
As prices went down,
so demand increased,
Leaving Cotswold
tobacco an expensive and ignored anachronism;
But sometimes, even
today, when you walk through some field,
You might just catch
the rustle of Nicotiana Rustica,
Defiantly asserting
its freeborn constitution.
So the next time you
strike a light,
Then strike a light
to light the strike
Of the Cotswold tobacco
growers,
For who knows how
different history could have been,
If those freeborn
Cotswold men and women
Had been allowed to
break that exotic link,
That link between
tobacco and the coffee house -
Who knows how many
thousands of Africans
Might have been
spared the middle passage
And a life of
plantation enslavement?
Old Cotswold and Winchcombe Gold instead of
cold Bristol slavery.
With thanks to Will
Simpson and Jim McNeill for their Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #9
‘Nicotiana
Brittanica’
